Abstract

However strongly one feels about the wrong of lying in general, being lied to by certain people in particular tends to touch a distinct and more sensitive nerve. It affects us more deeply, and in a different way, when we learn that a friend, loved one, or other intimate¹ has told us a lie. Even if, as most moralists maintain, everyone should always tell the truth, we think friends and other intimates have special reason to be honest with one another. Why should we think this? Why is honesty among friends so important, dishonesty among friends a distinctive and serious vice? The answer, I believe, is that cultivating and maintaining friendship requires treating our friends as entitled to claim our trust—in particular, our trust in what they tell us. We are thus especially vulnerable to our friends’ lies. Indeed, this is so in at least two ways. Because we are obligated to our friends to show them considerably more trust in what they say than we may choose to show others, we are more prone to being taken in by them should they prove dishonest. And because the matters about which we are bound to trust them are likely to be of greater significance, we can be more deeply wounded by them should they betray us. The central idea of this chapter, then, is that lying among friends is especially vicious because it exploits a significant and distinctive form of vulnerability to our friends that we must incur, insofar as we are close